.doc to pdf using python

If you don’t mind using PowerShell have a look at this Hey, Scripting Guy! article. The code presented could be adopted to use the wdFormatPDF enumeration value of WdSaveFormat (see here).
This blog article presents a different implementation of the same idea.

I would suggest ignoring your supervisor and use OpenOffice which has a Python api. OpenOffice has built in support for Python and someone created a library specific for this purpose (PyODConverter).

If he isn’t happy with the output, tell him it could take you weeks to do it with word.

You should start from investigating so called virtual PDF print drivers.
As soon as you will find one you should be able to write batch file that prints your DOC files into PDF files. You probably can do this in Python too (setup printer driver output and issue document/print command in MSWord, later can be done using command line AFAIR).

It’s worth noting that Stevens answer works, but make sure if using a for loop to export multiple files to place the ClientObject or Dispatch statements before the loop – it only needs to be created once – see my problem: Python win32com.client.Dispatch looping through Word documents and export to PDF; fails when next loop occurs

unoconv (writen in Python) and OpenOffice running as a headless daemon.

https://github.com/unoconv/unoconv

http://dag.wiee.rs/home-made/unoconv/

Works very nicely for doc, docx, ppt, pptx, xls, xlsx.

Very useful if you need to convert docs or save/convert to certain formats on a server.

I have worked on this problem for half a day, so I think I should share some of my experience on this matter. Steven’s answer is right, but it will fail on my computer. There are two key points to fix it here:

(1). The first time when I created the ‘Word.Application’ object, I should make it (the word app) visible before open any documents. (Actually, even I myself cannot explain why this works. If I do not do this on my computer, the program will crash when I try to open a document in the invisible model, then the ‘Word.Application’ object will be deleted by OS. )

(2). After doing (1), the program will work well sometimes but may fail often. The crash error "COMError: (-2147418111, 'Call was rejected by callee.', (None, None, None, 0, None))" means that the COM Server may not be able to response so quickly. So I add a delay before I tried to open a document.

After doing these two steps, the program will work perfectly with no failure anymore. The demo code is as below. If you have encountered the same problems, try to follow these two steps. Hope it helps.

    import os
    import comtypes.client
    import time


    wdFormatPDF = 17


    # absolute path is needed
    # be careful about the slash '', use '\' or '/' or raw string r"..."
    in_file=r'absolute path of input docx file 1'
    out_file=r'absolute path of output pdf file 1'

    in_file2=r'absolute path of input docx file 2'
    out_file2=r'absolute path of outputpdf file 2'

    # print out filenames
    print in_file
    print out_file
    print in_file2
    print out_file2


    # create COM object
    word = comtypes.client.CreateObject('Word.Application')
    # key point 1: make word visible before open a new document
    word.Visible = True
    # key point 2: wait for the COM Server to prepare well.
    time.sleep(3)

    # convert docx file 1 to pdf file 1
    doc=word.Documents.Open(in_file) # open docx file 1
    doc.SaveAs(out_file, FileFormat=wdFormatPDF) # conversion
    doc.Close() # close docx file 1
    word.Visible = False
    # convert docx file 2 to pdf file 2
    doc = word.Documents.Open(in_file2) # open docx file 2
    doc.SaveAs(out_file2, FileFormat=wdFormatPDF) # conversion
    doc.Close() # close docx file 2   
    word.Quit() # close Word Application 

I tried the accepted answer but wasn’t particularly keen on the bloated PDFs Word was producing which was usually an order of magnitude bigger than expected. After looking how to disable the dialogs when using a virtual PDF printer I came across Bullzip PDF Printer and I’ve been rather impressed with its features. It’s now replaced the other virtual printers I used previously. You’ll find a “free community edition” on their download page.

The COM API can be found here and a list of the usable settings can be found here. The settings are written to a “runonce” file which is used for one print job only and then removed automatically. When printing multiple PDFs we need to make sure one print job completes before starting another to ensure the settings are used correctly for each file.

import os, re, time, datetime, win32com.client

def print_to_Bullzip(file):
    util = win32com.client.Dispatch("Bullzip.PDFUtil")
    settings = win32com.client.Dispatch("Bullzip.PDFSettings")
    settings.PrinterName = util.DefaultPrinterName      # make sure we're controlling the right PDF printer

    outputFile = re.sub(".[^.]+$", ".pdf", file)
    statusFile = re.sub(".[^.]+$", ".status", file)

    settings.SetValue("Output", outputFile)
    settings.SetValue("ConfirmOverwrite", "no")
    settings.SetValue("ShowSaveAS", "never")
    settings.SetValue("ShowSettings", "never")
    settings.SetValue("ShowPDF", "no")
    settings.SetValue("ShowProgress", "no")
    settings.SetValue("ShowProgressFinished", "no")     # disable balloon tip
    settings.SetValue("StatusFile", statusFile)         # created after print job
    settings.WriteSettings(True)                        # write settings to the runonce.ini
    util.PrintFile(file, util.DefaultPrinterName)       # send to Bullzip virtual printer

    # wait until print job completes before continuing
    # otherwise settings for the next job may not be used
    timestamp = datetime.datetime.now()
    while( (datetime.datetime.now() - timestamp).seconds < 10):
        if os.path.exists(statusFile) and os.path.isfile(statusFile):
            error = util.ReadIniString(statusFile, "Status", "Errors", '')
            if error != "0":
                raise IOError("PDF was created with errors")
            os.remove(statusFile)
            return
        time.sleep(0.1)
    raise IOError("PDF creation timed out")

As an alternative to the SaveAs function, you could also use ExportAsFixedFormat which gives you access to the PDF options dialog you would normally see in Word. With this you can specify bookmarks and other document properties.

doc.ExportAsFixedFormat(OutputFileName=pdf_file,
    ExportFormat=17, #17 = PDF output, 18=XPS output
    OpenAfterExport=False,
    OptimizeFor=0,  #0=Print (higher res), 1=Screen (lower res)
    CreateBookmarks=1, #0=No bookmarks, 1=Heading bookmarks only, 2=bookmarks match word bookmarks
    DocStructureTags=True
    );

The full list of function arguments is: ‘OutputFileName’, ‘ExportFormat’, ‘OpenAfterExport’, ‘OptimizeFor’, ‘Range’, ‘From’, ‘To’, ‘Item’, ‘IncludeDocProps’, ‘KeepIRM’, ‘CreateBookmarks’, ‘DocStructureTags’, ‘BitmapMissingFonts’, ‘UseISO19005_1’, ‘FixedFormatExtClassPtr’

You can use the docx2pdf python package to bulk convert docx to pdf. It can be used as both a CLI and a python library. It requires Microsoft Office to be installed and uses COM on Windows and AppleScript (JXA) on macOS.

from docx2pdf import convert

convert("input.docx")
convert("input.docx", "output.pdf")
convert("my_docx_folder/")

pip install docx2pdf
docx2pdf input.docx output.pdf

Disclaimer: I wrote the docx2pdf package. https://github.com/AlJohri/docx2pdf

I was working with this solution but I needed to search all .docx, .dotm, .docm, .odt, .doc or .rtf and then turn them all to .pdf (python 3.7.5). Hope it works…

import os
import win32com.client

wdFormatPDF = 17

for root, dirs, files in os.walk(r'your directory here'):
    for f in files:

        if  f.endswith(".doc")  or f.endswith(".odt") or f.endswith(".rtf"):
            try:
                print(f)
                in_file=os.path.join(root,f)
                word = win32com.client.Dispatch('Word.Application')
                word.Visible = False
                doc = word.Documents.Open(in_file)
                doc.SaveAs(os.path.join(root,f[:-4]), FileFormat=wdFormatPDF)
                doc.Close()
                word.Quit()
                word.Visible = True
                print ('done')
                os.remove(os.path.join(root,f))
                pass
            except:
                print('could not open')
                # os.remove(os.path.join(root,f))
        elif f.endswith(".docx") or f.endswith(".dotm") or f.endswith(".docm"):
            try:
                print(f)
                in_file=os.path.join(root,f)
                word = win32com.client.Dispatch('Word.Application')
                word.Visible = False
                doc = word.Documents.Open(in_file)
                doc.SaveAs(os.path.join(root,f[:-5]), FileFormat=wdFormatPDF)
                doc.Close()
                word.Quit()
                word.Visible = True
                print ('done')
                os.remove(os.path.join(root,f))
                pass
            except:
                print('could not open')
                # os.remove(os.path.join(root,f))
        else:
            pass

The try and except was for those documents I couldn’t read and won’t exit the code until the last document.

I have tested many solutions but no one of them works efficiently on Linux distribution.

I recommend this solution :

import sys
import subprocess
import re


def convert_to(folder, source, timeout=None):
    args = [libreoffice_exec(), '--headless', '--convert-to', 'pdf', '--outdir', folder, source]

    process = subprocess.run(args, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE, timeout=timeout)
    filename = re.search('-> (.*?) using filter', process.stdout.decode())

    return filename.group(1)


def libreoffice_exec():
    # TODO: Provide support for more platforms
    if sys.platform == 'darwin':
        return '/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice'
    return 'libreoffice'

and you call your function:

result = convert_to('TEMP Directory',  'Your File', timeout=15)

All resources:

https://michalzalecki.com/converting-docx-to-pdf-using-python/

I have modified it for ppt support as well. My solution support all the below-specified extensions.

word_extensions = [".doc", ".odt", ".rtf", ".docx", ".dotm", ".docm"]
ppt_extensions = [".ppt", ".pptx"]

My Solution: Github Link

I have modified code from Docx2PDF

import docx2txt
from win32com import client

import os

files_from_folder = r"c:\doc"

directory = os.fsencode(files_from_folder)

amount = 1

word = client.DispatchEx("Word.Application")
word.Visible = True

for file in os.listdir(directory):
    filename = os.fsdecode(file)
    print(filename)

    if filename.endswith('docx'):
        text = docx2txt.process(os.path.join(files_from_folder, filename))

        print(f'{filename} transfered ({amount})')
        amount += 1
        new_filename = filename.split('.')[0] + '.txt'

        try:
            with open(os.path.join(files_from_folder + r'txt_files', new_filename), 'w', encoding='utf-8') as t:
                t.write(text)
        except:
            os.mkdir(files_from_folder + r'txt_files')
            with open(os.path.join(files_from_folder + r'txt_files', new_filename), 'w', encoding='utf-8') as t:
                t.write(text)
    elif filename.endswith('doc'):
        doc = word.Documents.Open(os.path.join(files_from_folder, filename))
        text = doc.Range().Text
        doc.Close()

        print(f'{filename} transfered ({amount})')
        amount += 1
        new_filename = filename.split('.')[0] + '.txt'

        try:
            with open(os.path.join(files_from_folder + r'txt_files', new_filename), 'w', encoding='utf-8') as t:
                t.write(text)
        except:
            os.mkdir(files_from_folder + r'txt_files')
            with open(os.path.join(files_from_folder + r'txt_files', new_filename), 'w', encoding='utf-8') as t:
                t.write(text)
word.Quit()

The Source Code, see here:

https://neculaifantanaru.com/en/python-full-code-how-to-convert-doc-and-docx-files-to-pdf-from-the-folder.html